Release Notes

Product notes, new features, and known bugs for Red Hat Satellite 6.2.

Red Hat SatelliteDocumentation Team

This document contains product notes, brief descriptions of new features, and known bugs for Red Hat Satellite 6.2.

Chapter 1. Introduction

Red Hat Satellite 6 is the evolution of Red Hat's life cycle management platform. It provides the capabilities that administrators have come to expect in a tool focused on managing systems and content for a global enterprise. Satellite 6 covers the use cases requested by Satellite 5 customers, but also includes functionality that enables larger scale, federation of content, better control of systems during the provisioning process, and a much more simplified approach to life cycle management. Satellite 6 also further evolves the inherent approach to certificate-based entitlements and integrated subscription management. Satellite 6 is based on years of customer feedback and is an evolution of previous versions.

1.1. Satellite 6 Component Versions

Red Hat Satellite is a combination of a number of upstream projects. For the full details of the major projects included, and the version of those projects included in each major and minor release of Red Hat Satellite, see Satellite 6 Component Versions.

Chapter 2. New Features and Enhancements

This chapter introduces new features in Red Hat Satellite 6.2, and links to further information.

Increase Efficiency with Automated Workflows

Satellite 6.2 introduces remote execution, automating workflows and enabling users to take multiple actions against groups of systems, such as rebooting a system after a patch install or conduct rolling upgrades across hundreds of systems as easily as one. Users can easily build a script library, share scripts and share repeatable workflows, enabling less experienced administrators to execute complex workflows. In addition, users can schedule tasks and use new dashboards for enhanced interaction with systems under management.

Increase Security in Disconnected Environments

Satellite 6.2 provides the ability to synchronize and export content from one Satellite to another, especially useful for organizations that require their systems management solution to run disconnected from the internet for security purposes.

More Flexible Provisioning

Discovery enhancements in Satellite simplify the process of building systems and allow end users to more efficiently provision systems in secured environments where DHCP and PXE may not be available.

Increased Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability

Satellite 6.2 includes a number performance enhancements, highlighted by the following:

Build systems during content synch

Streamlined content synchronization enables users to build systems almost immediately after install while content downloads in the background.

Faster backups

Satellite content synchronization speeds the backup and restore process because software packages are no longer required to be backed up. This drastically reduces the amount of time a Satellite needs to be offline for backup.

Capsule visibility

The Red Hat Satellite Capsule user interface provides much deeper insight into the health of the Capsule, such as what services are running and their status, from the centralized Satellite console.

Lighter-Weight Capsules

Red Hat Satellite repositories can be configured to store only the content that has been requested by clients. This reduces the storage needed. This feature is available as a Technology Preview in Satellite 6.2. For information on Red Hat Technology Preview features support scope, see Technology Preview Features Support Scope. Note that this feature is fully supported from release 6.2.3.

Ability to Import Existing Hosts

Satellite 6.2 features new scripts and automation to import existing Red Hat infrastructure hosts that may reside on any Red Hat systems management platform, including Red Hat Satellite 5.x. This bootstrap script automates the process of registering systems to Satellite, dramatically reducing the number of steps required to get existing systems ready to be managed by Red Hat Satellite.

Chapter 3. Release Information

These release notes highlight technology preview items, recommended practices, known issues, and deprecated functionality to be taken into consideration when deploying this release of Red Hat Satellite 6.

Notes for updates released during the support lifecycle of this Red Hat Satellite 6 release will appear in the advisory text associated with each update.

3.1. Enhancements

This release of Red Hat Satellite 6 features the following enhancements:

Previously, the virt-who daemon recognized any file in the /etc/virt-who.d/ directory as a potential configuration file, regardless of extension. With the release of Red Hat Satellite 6.2.9 and virt-who version 0.19 and above, only files with the .conf extension are now recognized as potential configuration files. All configuration files without the .conf extension must be updated to include this extension.

This release introduces the ability to export content from one Satellite Server and import it into another server. The content can come from the Library, or can be from a content view. This feature can be used to support populating an air-gapped server with content from another server.

This release adds a Remote Execution feature that allows users to execute commands against machines under inventory. The commands can be stored as jobs, and can be scheduled to run in the future or on a recurring basis.

A bootstrap script has been included with Red Hat Satellite 6.2. This script takes a machine that has been provisioned outside of Red Hat Satellite 6.2 and registers the host, installs the appropriate certificates, and configures puppet. If the host was previously registered with Red Ht Satellite 5, the script selects the correct subscriptions based on the channels that are assigned to the host.

With this release, the backup script has been updated to allow for backing up database information. This option improves backup performance for users whose packages are stored on backed-up file systems.

This release introduces the ability to provision Red Hat Atomic Host in addition to standard Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This includes syncing down Atomic Content, promoting that content through a lifecycle environment, and provisioning Atomic Hosts.

3.2. Release Notes

This section outlines important details about the release, including recommended practices and notable changes to Red Hat Satellite. You must take this information into account to ensure the best possible outcomes for your deployment.

During a Satellite 6.2 upgrade, as part of the host unification feature, if a host and content host are found with the same name but within different organizations, the content host will be unregistered. This will remove the content host from the Satellite. Consequently, once the content host has been unregistered by the upgrade process, it is possible that errors will be observed in /var/log/foreman/production.log as the content host may still attempt to interact with the Satellite via Red Hat Subscription Manager (RHSM).
The errors can include ones similar to the following:
2016-06-20 04:02:30 [app] [E] RestClient::Unauthorized: Katello::Resources::Candlepin::Consumer: 401 Unauthorized {"displayMessage":"Invalid oauth unit or secret","requestUuid":"56562131-15b1-482b-86c3-a74da4b19491"} (GET /candlepin/consumers/c1d5c956-b9c5-4088-914b-fd5e0e828c32)
2016-06-20 04:22:23 [app] [E] RestClient::Gone: Katello::Resources::Candlepin::Consumer: 410 Gone {"displayMessage":"Unit c1d5c956-b9c5-4088-914b-fd5e0e828c32 has been deleted","requestUuid":"4d433cb8-e94a-49dc-9d2f-eebdc7066e55","deletedId":"c1d5c956-b9c5-4088-914b-fd5e0e828c32"}
Workaround
Prior to performing the Satellite 6.2 upgrade, the user should execute the pre-upgrade script on the Satellite 6.1 Server to obtain a summary of the content hosts that will be unregistered. The script may be executed as:
foreman-rake katello:upgrade_check
Prior to the upgrade, the user should then update the hosts and content hosts to ensure that they are in the correct organizations. If this is not done prior to the upgrade, the user will need to re-register each of those content hosts using the Red Hat Subscription Manager command-line tool after the upgrade has completed.

In Satellite 6.2, Docker support has been upgraded from Docker v1 to v2. With this change, Docker has made fundamental changes in its data model to move from supporting Docker Images to supporting Docker Manifests. Due to the significance of this change, any existing Docker v1 repositories will be removed from the Satellite during the upgrade process.

During a Satellite 6.2 upgrade, as part of the host unification feature, if a host and content host are found with same name but within different organizations, the content host will be unregistered. This will remove the content host from the Satellite. Consequently, once the content host has been unregistered by the upgrade process, it is possible that errors will be observed in /var/log/messages as the content host may still attempt to interact with the Satellite via the agent.
The errors can include ones similar to the following:
[Protocol] error Error on attach: Node not found: pulp.agent.737d5dde-2ec8-4b21-9933-3e7fa45cbf77
Workaround
Prior to performing the Satellite 6.2 upgrade, the user should execute the pre-upgrade script on the Satellite 6.1 Server to obtain a summary of the content hosts that will be unregistered. The script may be executed as:
foreman-rake katello:upgrade_check
Prior to the upgrade, the user should then update the hosts and content hosts to ensure that they are in the correct organizations. If this is not done prior to the upgrade, the user will need to re-register each of those content hosts using the Red Hat Subscription Manager command-line tool after the upgrade has completed.

Rails events no longer triggering hooks in /hooks/report
In Satellite 6.2 the Report class is changed to ConfigReport so the hooks are no longer looking for a script stored in the /hooks/report/ directory.
Create a directory /usr/share/foreman/config/hooks/config_report/ and move hooks such as `after_create` and `before_create` to the new directory.

Using the katello-backup script with the --online-backup option requires a directory writable by the postgres user. Until this Red Hat Bugzilla is resolved, use only the /tmp directory to create online backups.

3.4. Deprecated Functionality

The items in this section are either no longer supported or will no longer be supported in a future release

The 'has_primary_interface?' method has been deprecated, so any attempt to use it results in the error "undefined method" being thrown. In Red Hat Satellite 6.2, each host automatically gets a primary interface when it is created, so this method is no longer required. Instead, the following tests whether the interface has an identifier:
host.primary_interface.identifier.empty?
The whole network interface object is available via the method: host.primary_interface.

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